In my own experience, such situations were more likely when the system was already suffering some other issue or failure, like a failing array member or a volum

In my own experience, such situations were more likely when the system was already suffering some other issue or failure, like a failing array member or a volume out of space or something more routine, and in the course of troubleshooting, ah shit, now I have a corrupted root to deal with. Had one app that crashed inexplicably every year at midnight on Halloween. Or at least the two years I put up with it. Had to leave a party to rebuild a server from scratch when one failure turned into lots of failures. Not missing those days!